Hitachi develops technology for secure anonymization of personal data

Demand for anonymized personal data is expected to grow following the amendment of the Personal Information Protection Act. From the perspective of personal information protection, this will result in increased demand for more secure ways to anonymize data. Accordingly, Hitachi has developed technology for securely anonymizing encrypted personal data.

Ensuring security when using personal data

In response to growing use of big data, the amendment of the Personal Information Protection Act will allow third-party use of personal data once it has been anonymized to make it hard to identify specific individuals. The use of anonymized personal data is expected to grow in various areas, including highly targeted market research. In addition, the growing use of cloud technologies in big data analytics is creating demand for greater security in the handling of personal data and other sensitive data. Unfortunately, conventional anonymization technologies don't allow anonymization of encrypted data. They raise security concerns when the data is temporarily decrypted. In response, Hitachi has developed a technology that anonymizes personal data while keeping it encrypted in the cloud.
Beyond this, processing encrypted data has generally been dramatically slower than processing unencrypted data. By applying its innovative searchable encryption technologies, Hitachi has achieved practical processing speeds for encrypted data. To expand the secure use of personal data, Hitachi will continue developing practical applications for this newly developed anonymization technology.